Free The Plum Rains and Other Stories by Givens John Page A

called out?
    Hasegawa didn’t answer, and the bonze waited until he was sure he had nothing more to say on the subject then got up and went to retrieve his goats. He stood for a moment studying the rogue samurai who seemed to him like a man willing to sit by the edge of the road until the world itself shuddered to its end. Why’d you kill all of them?
    Hasegawa poked at his fire.
    You have a group like that, and one or two will be the cause of such evil deeds, and one or two will just go along with it. But maybe at least one of them didn’t really deserve to die.
    Which one?
    Well, I don’t know. No way for me to know.
    Me either, said Hasegawa. He looked at him. I guess that’s another thing for me to feel bad about. I already had quite a few.

W INTER S ECLUSION
    T hey were cold, and they were tired; and after reaching the half-way point, they had foundered on: Night rain at the barrier gate, and along this road walks no one , an idea that seemed to offer no way out of the gloom they had created for themselves.
    Old Master Bashō’s white paper doors still glowed with reflected snow light, but the circle of linking poets sat buried in shadows like funerary sentinels. Some moved their lips, considering options or sifting through precedents; some tapped folded fans against the floor mats, checking rhythm against syllable-count ; and some – deep in thought or chilled into stupefaction – stared blankly at nothing.
    Wine?
    It’s all gone.
    Tea then?
    Pot’s cold.
    The session scribe offered to read back the half-finished sequence from the beginning, but the Old Master said no. If they couldn’t recall their arrival, how could they hope to fashion a departure?
    Although they had heard this criticism before, usually in the same or similar terms, the linking poets configured their faces in the manner of thoughtful persons who have just been providedwith unexpected information, delaying, for the moment at least, the burden of the necessity of responding.
    Whatever their teacher possessed was provided by them. Rolls of cotton cloth or silk cloth were left on his veranda, and writing paper and ink sticks added to the supply on his alcove shelf. The Old Master would find sacks of rice dumped into his rice bin, pickled vegetables stored in his larder, and packets of tea poured into his tea caddy. Before formal group sessions, a cask of rice wine would appear inside his entryway gate, as would trays of rice cakes topped with strips of pressed fish, and afterwards, a few silver coins would be found tucked away discreetly in odd corners.
    ‘Walks no one,’ a voice intoned, ‘along this road walks…’
    ‘No one,’ echoed another, but he too could do nothing with the bleak stanza.
    Then the only woman in the room, Little Ohasu, swaddled like a bagworm in a winter robe too sombre for her profession and too large for her person, bowed formally, picked up her fan, and, her hand trembling with consternation and the cold, suggested a link:
    ‘A moonless dawn: in the icy clarity of the mountain stream, fingerlings.’
    The session scribe leaned forward to observe the woman kneeling demurely at the bottom of the room. Ohasu had never before dared to speak, much less attempted to add a stanza of her own. ‘Along this road walks no one,’ then, ‘a moonless dawn?’ He turned questioningly towards Old Master Bashō. ‘In the icy clarity of the mountain stream,’ the session scribe recited tentatively , as if requesting a clarification. ‘Fingerlings,’ wasn’t it? But the old man said nothing, and those around him sat staring straight ahead, their fans lying untouched before them.
    Ohasu picked up her fan again. Yes. To extend the emptiness of the road at the gate. But then to fill it in, add to it. So nomoon. Because of the rain. And no sun yet either. But the first brightening of the dawn sky means the rain is ending. And with that light you can see enough to have a sense of … of things beginning again. And it’s …